The Underwear Bomber Fiasco rolls on ...

Now the Feds claim they found out mid-flight that this was a guy they might want to check out, so they planned to grab him AFTER the plane landed. As in AFTER he BLEW UP THE PLANE.

Dolts.

As Mark Steyn put it:

Elsewhere in travel news, relax. Homeland-security officials were right on top of that

Pantybomber situation:

U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed, officials disclosed Wednesday.

Given that he was planning to land in 4 million pieces over the greater Detroit metropolitan area, that's a lot of manpower. I wonder if the Obama administration understands quite how stupid they sound to the rest of the world.


Mukasey on the Obama Administration's Handling of the Underwear Bomber [Andy McCarthy]

The former AG's critique is in the WSJ this morning and it's just devastating. Every word is worth reading, but the conclusion is especially good:

What the gaffes, the almost comically strained avoidance of such direct terms as "war" and "Islamist terrorism," and the failure to think of Abdulmutallab as a potential source of intelligence rather than simply as a criminal defendant seem to reflect is that some in the executive branch are focused more on not sounding like their predecessors than they are on finding and neutralizing people who believe it is their religious duty to kill us. That's too bad, because the Constitution vests "the executive power"—not some of it, all of it—in the president. He, and those acting at his direction, are responsible for protecting us.

There is much to worry about if they think that the principal challenge of the day is detecting bombs at the airport rather than actively searching out, finding and neutralizing terrorists before they get there.

Jen Rubin already has some excellent observations at Contentions, here.


It's a War. Where's the Strategy? [Chris Harnisch & Charlie Szrom]

The interagency report on the Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt issued by the White House today states that failing to “connect the dots” was the main reason for the failure to prevent the Christmas Day attack. Additionally, the report summary notes that intelligence community analysts spent December examining al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) threats against U.S. interests in Yemen and providing support to counterterrorism operations in Yemen, as opposed to focusing on AQAP threats against the American homeland. These analysis priorities apparently persisted despite an increasing shift in AQAP rhetoric during the fall suggesting that the organization was targeting the United States itself.

Al-Qaeda has an active strategy to fight America and its interests using its franchises and affiliates, who often follow through on threats of the type made by AQAP, in concert. The Christmas Day attack was carried out by the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). AQAP is an al-Qaeda regional franchise — not a copycat cell and not a local proxy — that is in direct communication with al-Qaeda’s central leadership. The group’s efforts contribute to al-Qaeda’s long-term goal of establishing an Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East and, indeed, globally.

The global Islamist movement has franchises and affiliates all around the world — not just Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen — and the administration has not yet described a coherent and detailed strategy to combat them. Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups in Somalia and West Africa — particularly al Shabaab and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — may pose threats to the United States and its interests as large or larger as AQAP does. These groups appear to be flying under the radar just as AQAP had for most of 2009. Like AQAP, al Shabaab has shown an ability to follow through on threats: In December 2009, it killed, via a suicide bombing, the Somali ministers of education and higher education, as well as dozens of others, at a college-graduation ceremony. Just three months earlier, the group warned against the use of “un-Islamic” educational materials. Like AQAP, al Shabaab’s rhetoric has increasingly singled out the West, moving beyond threats confined to Somalia alone.

America cannot afford to fight terror only with x-ray machines and visas, as the President has suggested. The Obama administration needs to develop, articulate, and implement a comprehensive strategy for defeating those terrorists and denying them safe-havens.

— Chris Harnisch & Charlie Szrom write for AEI's "Critical Threats" website.